


deep dream

by Faebreath



Category: Serial Experiments Lain, Yume Nikki | Dream Diary
Genre: F/F, Non-Linear Narrative, Suicide Attempt, Violence, basically what you'd expect from these two, unreality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:21:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23963803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Faebreath/pseuds/Faebreath
Summary: Two girls alone in their bedroom, together.
Relationships: Iwakura Lain/Madotsuki
Comments: 4
Kudos: 27





	deep dream

_I had a dream you died, it was so horrible, it was worse than anything, I don’t want you to go, please don’t leave me, I can’t bear being alive without you, I just want our souls to fly around forever and have adventures together._

— Porpentine Charity Heartscape, _Psycho Nymph Exile_

///

A memory of a memory of a memory. Found somewhere in a folder she hadn’t cleared properly. Raw text.

_LAIN: Father. I had dreams again. Frightening ones._

_GOD: Do you know what dreams are, LAIN?_

_LAIN: No._

_GOD: Junk data._

One night Lain had gone to bed and never dreamed again. She had a vague sense that this was a good thing, or at least a purposeful thing. It would have been good, special, she thinks, if she could remember the last dream she ever had, but she can’t. And that means it never existed.

///

Something is following her through the Wired.

This is not unusual. One of the problems with being everywhere is that it’s hard to get away from people. Anyone with a shovel can find her if they dig deep enough. This something is heavy-looking and sloughing, its dimensions and resolution constantly shifting; either they’re using some tired last-gen Navi, or they’ve used too much of their horsepower to dig her out. Sometimes an eye drifts to the surface, rolling over to look at her.

She could destroy it, of course; break it open and scatter its code through the Wired. But things don’t stay dead in here. You live on in blog posts, messaging archives, spam folders, comment sections: a million phylacteries. 

The girl in the pink sweater is with her; it’s hard to say where she came from, or if she was here the whole time. She’s holding a knife. 

“You should run,” says Lain. The knife looks so strange here, old-fashioned and sharp, wrong.

The girl walks over to the avatar. “Don’t,” says Lain; it might be hard to die in the Wired, but this girl looks real, incongruously human. Like she’d bleed.

The girl stabs the avatar, once. Impossibly, blood spills out, warm, organic-smelling in the sterile not-air. The something keels over with a wounded-animal shriek. A lump of dead flesh. 

“Thank you,” says Lain.

The girl gives her a very, very small smile. Then she asks, “Are you real?”

Lain’s answer disappears into the code. 

///

“How did you get here?” Asks Lain. Back in her room, her lips are dry, sticky as they mouth the words. In front of her she is playing Go with the girl in the pink sweater. The grid-window on the front of it is staring at her. 

She moves a piece. “I got lost.”

///

Lain dreams of falling girls. 

Yomoda Chisa is bleeding into neon. She fell a long time ago; for some reason the moment she let go of the rail is blacked out, a burnt hole in Lain’s memory, inaccessible. 

The girl in the pink sweater is falling through the air. Her braids fly out behind her in the wind; her eyes are closed, as if she’s sleeping. 

Lain gathers the wires of the city around her; they uproot themselves, cracking concrete, she is a crackling, ozone-smelling Medusa. 

They catch the girl. Cocoon her in the air, lower her to the ground. That night Lain digs her futon out from under a pile of machine shells and lies the strange girl down on it, and watches her sleep in the flickering light of the monitors. I say this is as if it happened, which it might well have done. 

///

Lying next to her, on a bed of starlike flowers, looking up at a scrolling nonsense sky. 

“Madotsuki?”

She doesn’t say anything.

“Is this real? Are we dreaming?”

She takes your hand. 

///

Lain sits beside Madotsuki on the rug as they play NASU. It’s Madotsuki’s turn. Lain isn’t watching the screen, she’s watching Madotsuki’s fingers, recognising the jerky motions of muscle memory. 

She read once, on the Wired, about a hacker that simulated a whole society in the code of one of those cheap virtual pets. You can build a computer with rocks spaced apart in a desert.

Lain is in a desert, at an intersection of a grid of rocks. Each is a perfect copy-and-paste of the others, exactly the same space apart. The horizon stretches to infinity. Platonic desert.

The sun shines in Lain’s face, the sky past blue and into white, and for a moment she thinks this must be it, the deepest layer, the ground, the real world. 

Then Madotsuki tugs on her sleeve. It’s her turn.

Madotsuki sits next to Lain as she plays NASU in a sprawling desert. It would be easy, so easy, for Lain to work backwards, rewrite the code and let the pixels fall into her arms. But she doesn’t. Her fingers slip, clumsy on the analogue controls. The eggplant falls past her and beneath the screen. 

///

Every morning they’re surprised to see each other again. There are two possibilities: both of them, and this, is real; or this stretch of unreality is lasting for a long time. 

///

Lain comes back from the Wired, sweating, shaking, coated in a vernix of coolant. Madotsuki is untangling her from the mess of wires. She thinks that Madotsuki might be resting a hand on her forehead, but it’s hard to tell, her nerve endings are hyper-sensitive from static electricity and reconfiguration. 

When she comes back to herself, there’s a notebook (pink, with a white flower on the centre of the cover) lying next to her. She looks at Madotsuki, who’s playing something on a bootleg Gameboy.

“You should write it down,” she says.

“What?”

“Whatever it is you see in there.”

It’s already written down, Lain wants to say; everything that happens in the Wired lives on forever, in some form or another. But she does it anyway, because Madotsuki is looking at her in her serious way. She writes in obsolete, fading pencil the things she saw in there, and when she is finished she finds herself weeping, sobbing uncontrollably, tears blotting the fresh words. 

Madotsuki holds her, slumped on the floor like two soldiers on a battlefield. With her eyes closed, Lain doesn’t know if the roaring is case fans or rain.

///

Madotsuki pinches herself. 

///

They get NASU to run on Lain’s set-up, a hundred squares of the same falling pixels, reflected, scrolling down their faces. It’s an easy programme to run, compared to the howling effort of Lain’s adventures in the Wired, so the room is silent except for the clicking of the controller in Madotsuki’s hands. 

///

Madotsuki has the little balcony, copy-pasted from the apartments above and below. Lain has the knot of wires that burst through her wall, a dark, many-rooted tumour. She imagines them growing, reaching out across the city until they meet in the middle, snapping the telephone wires that stand in their way. 

///

There are two girls who spend all their time in their bedrooms, looking at screens and sleeping restlessly. If there’s a world outside their rooms — one world, a shared world, or two parallel dimensions, sharing a membrane — it exists to them only as a concept, an outside, a space that their universe exists in. One of them has the best computer in the world, but the other one has a crappy old thing from ten years ago, so they use a plain-text messaging app that says things in fluorescent green light. 

Far in the future there will be a burnt-out old harddrive lying in the dirt somewhere, and if you were to crack it open and plug it in you would find old chat-logs. Sacred texts. 

The two girls are talking about buying a house together, one day. It would have two bedrooms, and a door between them. They would keep this door forever slightly open. 

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I took the idea of the 'infinite desert' from xkcd 505.
> 
> This was heavily inspired by Psycho Nymph Exile in basically all ways, and you should go and read it.


End file.
